


Hate

by MegGiry_Khaleesi



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-30 01:07:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18305063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MegGiry_Khaleesi/pseuds/MegGiry_Khaleesi
Summary: Sandor Clegane hates Sansa Stark. He hates her so much he fears he's losing his mind.A long one-shot from a half-drunk Sandor's POV in the days leading up to the Battle of the Blackwater. Slight supernatural/warg edge. Mostly just a look into the conflicted soul of the king's sworn shield.





	Hate

Only Gregor. Only Gregor matched his hatred for the girl.

Gregor and Sansa Stark. When he doesn't see one at night, he sees the other. One is surrounded by flames, and embers, the slice of swords through flesh, and cries of agony; the other by little talking birds, blue skies, and a she-wolf’s soft gaze.

He shudders, his teeth clenched, as the images of both swirl around his brain in his fever-drunk dream.

He wakes gasping; cold, then with flashes of fire. He swallows and realizes that in truth, he hasn’t thought of Gregor much of late; hasn't dreamt of him much since meeting Sansa Stark. He'd see instead her vast, innocent eyes look away from him with such obvious fear -- and the hatred would well up in him so fiercely it blocked out all other feeling in him.

Sometimes she sang to him in his dreams.

She is a little bird, and Sandor hates birds. Waking him from a hangover with their chirping; helplessly oblivious as he shoos them away when out camping with soldiers. Dogs and cats will at least snarl and spit, or rush off without a backward glance; birds just flutter in the air uncertainly, staring down at you with their large questioning eyes.

Insipid. Oblivious. Just like her.

He imagines her bright hair and eyes, voice piquant as she recites what her septa taught her. Too ignorant to resent her golden cage.

He remembers the moment he first laid eyes on her, as she stood with her family just outside the gates of Winterfell. It was as if she inhaled all the warmth missing from that barren, frozen icescape, drawn right into that drooping expression; those eyes limpid and sparkling as they took in her golden prince for the first time.

Sandor swallows, drowning with wine the memory of her happiness then. How pretty that happiness made her. 

She is not merely pretty, though. Oh no, not the little talking bird. She is beautiful. But how beautiful?

Not beautiful like the queen -- who was once but a beautiful lady, who never deigned to glance at the youngest living Clegane as he trudged faithfully beside her, her own private guard dog. The few times their eyes met in his time as her sworn shield, he saw nothing in those emeralds but a graceless contempt. He was not even a dog to her; he was something a dog shat out that she narrowly escaped stepping in.

It is the same look, thinly disguised, that he sees in every one of Baelish's women and the washer women he takes. The good ones make a stab at cooing the appropriate endearments, but at his snapping demand to save their pretty lies, they all end up shrugging and disrobing with dispassionate quickness. 

That, that he can handle, just as he can understand Cersei’s cynicism and corruption. His knightly ideals were burned away long ago, so he appreciates anyone who wears the same disenchantment plainly. And wear that disenchantment Cersei does, trapped there in the icy mask of her beauty.

But the girl --

The little bird --

Sansa Stark --

Her looks irritate him. Her beauty borders on the ridiculous, so closely does it mirror the fair maidens in the stories she so clearly loves. Her blue eyes are as large as saucers, her auburn hair so thick and soft she looks less like anything flesh and blood, and more a comical rendering of a beautiful damsel. The sort in painted advertisements for puppet shows and mummers' plays.

Her skin faintly glowed in the frozen sunlight that first day.

_Such a glow about her._

Something chimed in Sandor's soul at that first sight. A strange familiarity. Then it struck him: she was who the six-year-old Sandor had fantasized about in a hazy sort of way, so long ago. Some unclear, undefined lady with big eyes, flowing hair, and sweet words, who clung to his shoulders as he played with a wooden knight.

That pretty image always confused the young Sandor when it would pop into his brain; his cheeks would redden as if ashamed of this rather unmanly fantasy. 

Yet still, the idea of soft hands on Sandor’s shoulders remained with him, until Gregor pressed his face into the fire.

When he saw this blurred, forgotten image reborn in the young Stark get, a rage he hadn’t felt since Gregor’s knighting seared through him, blocking out everything else.

He loathed her at first sight. He loathes her still.

He loathed the way she once twittered and cooed about court – both before her father's death, and now, but with such difference in aim. One eager to please for the sake of pleasing; the other to survive.

He loathes how she'd curtsy so properly, even to him. Him. He loathed the way she used to scoff at her sister, a wild scampering thing, whose dark coloring and horsey grin reminded him of a far off, unclear day when an unclear figure of a mother told Sandor he had a baby sister. 

He loathed that for all the two Stark sisters snapped at each other, he'd seen a love there he could only vaguely remember, from before the fire. That love had been a hesitant thing constantly strained, and that was destroyed forever when the source shoved his face into the flames.

He hates Sansa Stark's brattiness, her stubbornness. He can't understand how she is never more innocent than when at her most intolerable. 

He hates those qualities because they remind him when Joff, the child, had them in abundance.

The future king was always a disagreeable little git, yes, from the beginning. He was a spoiled, pampered little fiend.

But only like most difficult children are.

He was ignorant of the hassle he caused. He looked up with big, innocent, questioning eyes when scolded by Sandor or by a septa.

Slowly, things changed.

His eyes still wore that innocence when he held the gutted cat up to his father. Sandor would always remember the flash of horror and sorrow in the boy's eyes the second his father struck his face.

The innocence never left Joff's eyes, but with that innocence grew a sullen, deadly desire to assert himself, to mark his power. 

Not even violent cynics like Sandor or the queen could fully comprehend the ferocity that took root in the boy's soul.

Only someone like Gregor could. Sandor's brother and his king were quite alike in temperament, really. 

He was looking after and guarding with his life the handsome, golden version of his brother.

And here came the fair maiden from young Sandor's fantasies, swooning over this lionized Gregor.

But now Sansa has been tested far more, abused far more, than Joff ever was. 

And still, still, she chirps about true knights and Florian and Jonquil.

She is full of melancholy, true; a pain and sorrow so deep they pervade her.

Yet she has hope, as well. Clings to it.

He hates that.

He hates the way the little bird’s large eyes widen at the sight of him; yet it is fear without hatred on her side, without contempt. Just fear, in its most primitive, innocent state.

The bird fluttering away from the stick he waved in the air.

Sandor shuts his stinging eyes tight in his cramped bed in his cramped quarters in the keep, remembering – 

_“He was no true knight.”_

When he had looked in her eyes after she said those words, he saw an ancient wolf gleaming back at him: serene, mournful, all-knowing. It was as if she were looking through time, and seeing what lay ahead for her. She could see the heartache, the betrayal, the torment in store for her. She saw them and faced them squarely, refusing to let that fate destroy her belief in true knights.

She somehow knew, somehow, the bloody fucking little witch, what it would be like for her. To be tested so much. To have every single one of those fairytales decapitated in front of her, to gaze upon those ideals staring mouth agape from the pike.

Somehow she could foresee this, and foresee that it would not break her like it did Sandor.

She would admit there were untrue knights; and yet, she still believed there _were_ true knights. Somewhere in the world.

True knights.

Ah.

The laughter burns in his chest.

Here we come to why he hates her most.

He had laughed when she said that to him, that night. He laughed because that was what he had said to himself, over and over and over again in bed, recovering from his burns. Shaking from the pain, the ointments useless.

_He is no true knight. He is no true knight. He is no true knight. He is no true knight he is no true knight_

He'd thought it over and over again, drifting in and out of consciousness. The words rang in his ears.

Those words gained a mocking lilt four years later, when Rhaegar Targaryen knighted Sandor's brother.

He'd been thinking about that, in the silence that followed his story to Sansa. He'd just been thinking the words when her hand fell on his shoulder.

_Her hands clinging to his shoulders_

“He was no true knight.”

His heart about stopped.

He knew then he hadn't been imagining it. What he had felt since that first moment in Winterfell. 

Something that grew and pulsed and is fucking _growing--_

Connection. Like wire, coiled tightly around them both.

He could feel her moods, her thoughts, even when apart from her.

He remembered leading Stranger back to camp after killing the butcher's boy. As Sandor had learned to do over the years, he had deliberately shoved the boy out of his mind. He was merely a dark bundle weighing down the saddle.

Sandor was about halfway back to camp when he felt a flash of shock, horror, and agony.

A bird was caught in a snare inside him, batting around desperately.

Then sorrow, such a deep, overwhelming sorrow.

Was it about the boy? 

He felt a strange panic catch at his throat. He kept his feet moving.

No, it wasn't the boy. He was sure of it.

But why this sudden –

“The butcher's boy?” Sandor blinked, forcing himself out of his panic-induced stiffness. 

He'd made it back to camp, and Ned Stark stood there in the shadows, headed in the opposite direction. 

He stood, unmoving, staring at Sandor. “You rode him down?”

Sandor laughed darkly to himself. He guessed the little wolf girl was found, otherwise he doubted Stark wouldn't have asked if he'd seen her.

Sandor was feeling more himself again. He stared past Ned Stark and said, “He ran. Not very fast.”

Later he found out that Ned Stark had been on his way to kill Sansa Stark's wolf pup. The keening in his mind near drove him mad the following days. Drink was all that dulled it.

Something was in deep, hysterical mourning in his mind. That something was Sansa Stark, that evil little Northern witch girl, and he hated the pure, unadulterated despair and love that pounded in his brain, from her, from _her_.

_Lady...oh, Lady...._

He woke the next morning with tears running down his cheeks.

He hardened himself. They were not his tears, they were hers.

 

He had nothing to do with it.

_But all at once there was the butcher's boy, running and tripping and crying, and pleading, begging for his life, his pained eyes that became the direwolf's. “Please don't kill me, ser, please, pleeeeease....”_

_Lady....._

His head buzzed for days leading up to that tourney. Then all of a sudden, his head and heart cleared, and the wings in his heart began to beat with a tremulous anticipation instead.

He looked up to the rows of nobles and saw Sansa Stark sitting in a pretty green dress, her face and eyes radiant as she clapped.

Gods, how he hated her.

_So that's all it takes, girl, to recover from your wolf's slaughter? Gallant knights handing you flowers? Sansa Stark, you worthless, vapid little nit._

And so he growled and snarled at her when he took her back to her rooms. With every quiet step, he felt her fear of him. He also could see that rare glow out of the corner of his eyes, encasing her.

Gods, he hated it, hated it, _hated her-_

And so everything came out. Everything that he had never spoken of. Everything that until that moment had been the most carefully guarded corner of his heart and soul. A dark pit protected by a thousand circling hounds.

He spat it all out bitterly, seeing before him that toy, that hateful gleam in Gregor's eyes, the flames, _oh gods, Father, help--_

_He is no--_

“He was no true knight.” 

Her hand, right there, on his shoulder. No fear.

A moment of steadying serenity entered his heart. Her white wolf's paw on his shoulder was willing comfort into him.

He looked up from where he knelt on the ground and saw her wolf's yellow eyes staring out of her pretty face.

That's when he laughed.

He was laughing at her, at himself, at his whole life.

For in that moment, he did not hate Sansa Stark.

He'd felt something else. It terrified him. And not knowing what to do with that terror, he laughed.

He eventually recovered, and had continued hating her, loathing her.

Yet that odd, swelling feeling – something truly unearthly, yet full of hope and light – hovered outside the hate. 

They lived hand in hand, these conflicting emotions, as he trailed her around the keep after her father's death. She was learning how to conceal herself better, both on the outside and in her soul. Her feelings were not quite so nakedly evident to him now.

Yet when their eyes met –

Sitting now in his quarters, close to morning, a by now nearly empty bottle of sour red in his hands, the hatred burned in his chest.

It burned so much he felt tears sting his eyes.

Because he knew what was on the other side of that hatred. Something much vaster, all consuming.

He had been bewitched, that was all. A hound bewitched by a winged wolf. 

It was a new kind of servitude, more binding than what he already knew with the Lannisters.

He stared into the halfway melted candle by his bed, into its flame. 

He saw golden eyes staring back at him.

_She-wolf._

He would leave it all behind. All of it. Leave her. Leave the accursed girl to her fate. 

This was the only option left to him, or else he would truly lose his mind.

If he stayed, he would murder his king, his queen, his brothers in the kingsguard. He would fall to his knees in front of the little bird-wolf and wail, cling to her legs, before he was dragged away to pay for his kingslaying.

No, he wouldn't let himself turn into that, into something more pathetic than the dog he already was.

Stannis and his fleet would be here soon. Maybe the Hound would die in battle, and then all of... _this_ would matter no more. 

He would be free.

The damn girl would have to look after herself, that's all.

He finished off the bottle and stood. He would dress, begin his rounds. He knew there would be no more sleep for him tonight.

With this resolve – die in battle or just leave it all behind – he still cursed himself and her when he found his feet taking him to her door.

He stood just outside the little bird's chambers.

_Take her away._

Yes, he hated Sansa Stark, but the little wolf beating its wings inside his heart at the thought of saving her....

It was a little too close to something other than hate.

He hated her for that more than anything.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll probably just leave this as a oneshot, but who knows, maybe I'll work it into a Blackwater AU someday. Thank you for reading!


End file.
